All Tomorrow’s Parties

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where the totalitarian religious-political sect Gui Dao governs Asia, All Tomorrow’s Parties is a vision of things to come as bleak as it is vague. Two brothers, Zhuai and Mian are sent to the Camp Prosper- ity to be re-educated and to get rid of all their dissident ideas. Camp life, however, is not only propaganda and strict rules to be obeyed. Zhuai meets the pretty Xuelan and when the sect is suddenly overthrown, he settles with her and her small boy in a nearly abandoned city. All Tomorrow’s Parties is photographer-director Yu Lik- Wai’s second feature ﬁ lm (his ﬁ rst, Love Will Tear Us Apart,was screen at the festival in 1999) and, although it takes place in a world of its own, it bears semblance to present day events and movements like the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the Falun Gong in China or the Aum in Japan. Still, its deliberately detached and slow moving aesthetics and truly stunning DV-photography makes it more of kin to the ﬁ lms of Andrei Tarkovsky in general, and Stalker in particular, rather than your average political allegory. KJELL CYPERN